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Fandom: FFXIV
Summary: Snowballed headcanon of Thancred's background!
Chapter Summary: Thancred starts researching, runs across one of the murders, and has A BRILLIANT IDEA. And by brilliant we mean "that person who was trying to warn him to not do anything dumb is getting the strange feeling she should be drinking herself into liver failure".
Warnings: Violence, gore, dead children
He was getting tired of the energy it took to skulk around, and had finally resorted to finding a ratty old heavy hooded cloak and getting enough of the silty mud from the riverbank near the clock tower ground into his face to look like he'd given up on trying to pass for respectable; heavy winter gloves and some loose, too-big old clothes with holes and as long as he kept his head down, even the guards weren't giving him a second look. Trying to keep an audience worked better if you were trying to keep clean and presentable, and they were looking for a fledgling bard, not someone that had given up on making a good impression. If it kept up much longer, he'd have to see if he could filch some kind of dye for his hair.
He wasn't managing to find much of anything useful, or overhear much; a younger prostitute from a few streets down disappearing, and a day and a half later, a bloody, mutilated body turning up on the riverbank. It wasn't someone he'd known well, but they'd met in passing a few times; she hadn't been all that good at getting food and things for herself before she'd moved into the whorehouse, he remembered a few stunts stealing bread for her, and making sure she had blankets stashed for when the weather turned colder.
The guards were still trying to catch Ives, who was better at going unnoticed than he was.
There had been the start of ice on windows. A few shops and homes had started putting out covered baskets hanging from windowsills, with bits of bread and less identifiable baked things made from scraps and leavings; a tradition dating back to an old story about the time when the gods did walk the world, and Oschon of the mountain wind traveling disguised as a ragged vagrant, blessing those that left something for his people when the weather turned harsh enough to kill.
It took some of the sting out of his preferred method of income suddenly not being an option, and meant a few less moments of picking pockets while he was wandering the streets.
He was half picking at a piece, something garbled between plain bread and something with a couple pieces of dried fruit in it, when he settled by the wind harp to sit – not as close as he usually would, just in case, but on the edge of the plaza.
There were already a few strings of beads and small shiny things hanging from the lower pipes, some of the poor and homeless leaving offerings and prayers.
He looked from it, to the piece of bread in his hands, and paused to check that the beaded scarf he'd filched earlier in the day was still in his pocket under the heavy cloak. Some of the orphaned kids had a wives' tale about the harp, that the higher you could manage to hang an offering, the easier it was for the wind to reach and the more likely the prayer that went with it would be answered.
He wedged the bread into another pocket, and walked calmly over to the harp; he was fast enough at climbing that nobody actually seemed to register what he was doing until he was halfway up and well out of reach, the guard that had been watching the square starting awake and hurrying over. He couldn't actually hear whatever the man was yelling over the howling of the wind through the pipes and wires, but he was pretty sure most of it was variations on “GET DOWN FROM THERE” and swearing.
He managed to perch precariously on the top of the central pillar of the harp, then hand-over-hand up an arm sweeping out to sit on the endcap of the highest point, legs hooked over the pipe he'd climbed for support; he managed to tie the bread into the scarf, and that around the arm of the harp.
A flash of movement out of the corner of his eye on the flat rooftop straight across from his perch caught his attention; he looked up to see Ives, leaning on the ledge, face incredulous. It was impossible to hear anything over the harp and Ives wasn't dumb enough to try, settling for a series of hand gestures – a couple sharp waves at where he was sitting, tapping the side of his head and waving a hand at Thancred, a raised fist and pointing down the direction of the guard, pointing down at the ground, and a wringing motion.
What do you think you're doing, are you touched in the head, there's a guard right there, I'm going to strangle you when you get down from there.
He basically ignored it, sliding back down the arm to the center of the harp; as soon as he'd started tying the bundle onto the arm, the guard had thrown up his hands and stalked off, leaning on the wall at the entrance to the plaza with his arms crossed, shaking his head.
By the time he got back to the ground, his hands and legs were numb from the vibration running through the metal and his ears were ringing; the guard looked like he was muttering something, but wasn't even watching anymore, much less moving to grab him.
He headed out of the plaza, ducking down an alley, up a few ledges and along an eave to the top of a peaked roof nearby.
Ives was already catching up, swinging up easily to sit over the peak. There was a quiet moment with a small angry hand gesture, and then the thief cuffed him on the side of the head, leaving him flailing an arm and catching the moulding to keep his own perch.
“What in the Seven Hells is wrong with you?! We're dodging half the law in the city, we're both wanted for murder, and you're climbing the fecking harp in broad daylight right in front of a guard?!”
“I was fine, and all he saw was some idiot street orphan following custom; he didn't even try for me.”
“He had the idiot street orphan bit down.” Ives crossed his arms, scowling. “Why?”
“Because right now if anybody in this district needs a prayer answered, it's us.”
“Please tell me you don't actually think that stupid legend means anything.”
“It's worth a try, and if any of the Twelve are going to listen, it'd be the Wanderer.”
Ives rolled his eyes with a half-coherent noise. “Do you really think we'd be stuck out here with everyone out to get us if there were gods that would help.”
“I don't think the Twelve are controlling the Inspector, and they certainly aren't responsible for the Voidspawn.”
“No, but it's proof they either don't exist or don't care; if they did, there'd be something here besides the thing you saw.”
“I'd rather pray to them for even a small blessing than sit on my hands and wait for it to kill me.”
“So you're praying to the mountain wind? What do you think was at work when you almost froze to death two years ago? Did it look like the wind cared then? The only way we're getting anything is if we take it ourselves, nobody's going to help you!”
He knew Ives had his moods where things wore on him, but this was a worse one; he edged back, catching a hand shaking on the roof as feeling was coming back into it. “I wouldn't be here if you hadn't pulled me out of that alley and helped me.”
Ives went still, wrinkling his nose and closing his eyes. “You were six and too stupid to knife anyone in the back.”
“And you haven't taken advantage of me yet.”
“What do you think this whole thing is? You mooch off me when you're having a bad week at the square, I mooch off you when things get too hot to work, we're both using each other.”
“...That's not really all you're doing anymore, is it?” It'd been eight years, and he was having a tiny war between knowing that Ives would settle out of it and apologize when some of the worst stress passed and things were less bad, and trying to remember if Ives had ever snapped about using him before instead of a general “most people are assholes” rant.
Ives went more still, taking a few breaths and calming down; a chill was settling over the rooftop, the dim clouded lighting not helping the autumn weather.
“Look, it's been a Hell of a moon, and I've never had the law out for my head like this before; I know you've got my back or they'd have already been scouring the clocktower. Just don't do something stupid like that again, alright? If they catch you it won't be like that last time when you were a kid and weren't fast enough getting your hand out of someone's pocket.” The thief looked down and away, shifting uncomfortably. “ I shouldn't have snapped at you like that.”
Thancred had to blink – by Ives's usual schedule he probably had a week or so after the murder inquisition died down before that would happen, but he wasn't about to argue with Ives growing up a bit. “I'll be more careful.” He drew in a breath. “The Inspector mentioned a name for what it was; I'm going to see if I can't poke around some of the libraries to find out if there's something we can use – they're not going to give up until they have proof you didn't do it.”
“You think you'll find something? That seems like the sort of stuff the scholars would keep a pretty tight lid on.”
He shrugged, leaning back with a hand on the spine of the roof. “I know I've seen a couple bestiaries around that had chapters on Voidspawn; if it's not in one of them, I'll just have to look harder.”
Ives was getting one of those resigned looks. “Do you have any idea how suspicious it'd look if they catch you researching voidspawn when there's rumors there's a cult around?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Ives rolled his eyes with a headshake. “If you don't find anything in the books that're easy to get, let me know; I'll see if I can't get you in touch with some of my contacts, one of them might know something that's not in the books.”
He didn't really trust going to some of the criminal groups, but it was something where they might not have a lot of choice. “I will.”
“Let's get out of this weather; it looks like it might start snowing.”
He made it through a few smaller libraries and bookstores without much luck at all; vague rumors of more powerful beings, but half of it was gibberish that reeked of overblown traveler’s stories, and the other half was a hazy 'they exist and none have lived to tell (that we know of)'. The nagging sense he had a clue that he'd forgotten only got worse, until finally he ended up perching inside the clocktower during the day, curled around the soulstone and focused on it, quietly running through some of the weirder things he'd gotten from it, trying to pay attention to the words he was saying and the meaning it was giving him at the same time.
He caught it in a fragment, something he'd been working on teasing out of it for a while, a meaning flashing through with the snatch of lyric -
'Ware the shadowless, ere your soul will rot.
Ascian.
The only other thing he managed to coax was a few verses of something to do with the collapse of Allag that mostly seemed to be lamenting the arrogance of the late emperor and man's overreached grasp, with one line about “Allagan's Bane” and poisoned gifts, with an entirely different word in Allag that had the same meaning.
Shadowless.
He thunked his head against the wall, exhausted; that was the problem with trying to shake history of a bardic soulstone, ballads and tales didn't necessarily go into a great deal of detail. He knew if he had gotten anything it would've been a gamble if it was even useful and not some embellishment, but that had turned out to be a moot worry, since all he'd really gotten was vague, ominous, and not much.
The largest libraries he dared hadn't been any more help, and the few wider-spread treatises on Allag were mostly focused on piecing things together from bits of archaeological fragments and guesswork about politics and the possible implications of different kinds of potsherds. That managed to get the soulstone reacting, but only resulting in him getting some folk ballad in his head about a fallen hero tortured into a weapon by the Emperor as a punishment for rebellion, calling for divine retribution for the Empire's evils, and fragments of some other counter about the same warrior and his vicious campaign to bring chaos to the benevolent Empire blessed by the gods, mercifully granted a new life.
Fascinating and horrifying, but utterly useless for what he needed.
He was trudging his way back to the clocktower, snow dusting the old cloak, when there was noise and commotion that sounded agitated and alarming, occasional calls of guards trying to break up the crowd around a small church; he hurried towards, curiosity and the sinking feeling it was more relevant than his reading overriding his better sense.
It wasn't a large group of people, and the snatches of conversation he overheard were horrified - “how could anyone”, “the poor thing”, “isn't the priest still in there?” - the inspector was on the steps, having some kind of agitated conversation with a lady roegadyn guard armed with a pistol and gesturing at the door, a few others keeping the passersby back and trying to shoo them away -
And a pikeman trying to take down a gutted child's corpse that'd been nailed over the door.
He found a place further back among the crowd, mouth gone dry and trying not to look; he'd seen dead bodies before, but usually not that mutilated, and aiming for that kind of sacrilege narrowed the list of possible directions it could've come from hard.
The inspector and the marksman came to some kind of agreement, each pushing one of the double doors open; he couldn't make out whatever the inspector shouted over the crowd noise, and it wasn't helped that it was cut off by the simultaneous sound of a gunshot and some kind of unholy screech. The small crowd gathered was very quickly deciding to comply with the directions to get away from the church.
He caught a bare glimpse past them of black wings, a gold and red eye bigger across than his shoulders, and a maw made of teeth; there was a crack of lightning from the inspector's rod followed fast after by a gout of flame over the creature as the thing went down, and the both of them had gone barreling inside.
It was easier to see and he wasn't sure that was a good thing, trying to be as small as he felt in with the newly spaced out and drawn back handful of onlookers. When they came back out, the Inspector still had his rod in hand, a few small arcs of aether running along it, and the marksman was carrying a limp, robed corpse roughly by the back of the neck, the hood hanging half-off around a hole in the head.
What he'd caught of the face was familiar – someone a bit older that was in and out of some of the orphanages, a few dim memories of ducking snowballs in the winter.
He didn't process that the Inspector was addressing the crowd until it was partway through, catching back up with his surroundings in mid-sentence.
“-anyone knows anything about who else is working with this one-” He made a sharp gesture at the corpse the marksman was grimly holding up with his rod - “There will be a reward for coming forward, and we are prepared to negotiate to put an end to this-”
He realized that he was getting more visible as the crowd thinned, people straggling off talking in hushed whispers; he pulled the hood down and hurried off.
With the brazen attack on a church, everything went even worse; Ives was in and out at stranger hours and more harried, and the armed presence on the street had increased.
He heard people talking; that the young man that'd been killed in the church had killed the priest for the summoning, that they thought he was one of the ringleaders, that they were trying to find the cult's hideout and a couple others among the homeless that were leading it.
He waited at the clock tower, resolving to see if Ives could manage anything with his contacts; this ended with him almost treed for a day and a half, the cordons bad enough that he was pretty sure the thief didn't dare come close.
When he got out he went looking; there wasn't much sign of Ives, and if he didn't hear a few of the guards talking about tracking him, he'd have worried he'd gotten caught.
It didn't help the fear that he'd been caught by something else.
There was another quiet disappearance, almost overshadowed by the fallout of the assault on the church, someone a few years younger than him.
He left the district; it wasn't too hard to change costume again and start slipping into libraries, going over shelves; he managed to find a lead, of sorts, but every mention he found was of a different text, and trying to go through library and college records for where it was listed a “special collection” in the main towers.
Summary: Snowballed headcanon of Thancred's background!
Chapter Summary: Thancred starts researching, runs across one of the murders, and has A BRILLIANT IDEA. And by brilliant we mean "that person who was trying to warn him to not do anything dumb is getting the strange feeling she should be drinking herself into liver failure".
Warnings: Violence, gore, dead children
He was getting tired of the energy it took to skulk around, and had finally resorted to finding a ratty old heavy hooded cloak and getting enough of the silty mud from the riverbank near the clock tower ground into his face to look like he'd given up on trying to pass for respectable; heavy winter gloves and some loose, too-big old clothes with holes and as long as he kept his head down, even the guards weren't giving him a second look. Trying to keep an audience worked better if you were trying to keep clean and presentable, and they were looking for a fledgling bard, not someone that had given up on making a good impression. If it kept up much longer, he'd have to see if he could filch some kind of dye for his hair.
He wasn't managing to find much of anything useful, or overhear much; a younger prostitute from a few streets down disappearing, and a day and a half later, a bloody, mutilated body turning up on the riverbank. It wasn't someone he'd known well, but they'd met in passing a few times; she hadn't been all that good at getting food and things for herself before she'd moved into the whorehouse, he remembered a few stunts stealing bread for her, and making sure she had blankets stashed for when the weather turned colder.
The guards were still trying to catch Ives, who was better at going unnoticed than he was.
There had been the start of ice on windows. A few shops and homes had started putting out covered baskets hanging from windowsills, with bits of bread and less identifiable baked things made from scraps and leavings; a tradition dating back to an old story about the time when the gods did walk the world, and Oschon of the mountain wind traveling disguised as a ragged vagrant, blessing those that left something for his people when the weather turned harsh enough to kill.
It took some of the sting out of his preferred method of income suddenly not being an option, and meant a few less moments of picking pockets while he was wandering the streets.
He was half picking at a piece, something garbled between plain bread and something with a couple pieces of dried fruit in it, when he settled by the wind harp to sit – not as close as he usually would, just in case, but on the edge of the plaza.
There were already a few strings of beads and small shiny things hanging from the lower pipes, some of the poor and homeless leaving offerings and prayers.
He looked from it, to the piece of bread in his hands, and paused to check that the beaded scarf he'd filched earlier in the day was still in his pocket under the heavy cloak. Some of the orphaned kids had a wives' tale about the harp, that the higher you could manage to hang an offering, the easier it was for the wind to reach and the more likely the prayer that went with it would be answered.
He wedged the bread into another pocket, and walked calmly over to the harp; he was fast enough at climbing that nobody actually seemed to register what he was doing until he was halfway up and well out of reach, the guard that had been watching the square starting awake and hurrying over. He couldn't actually hear whatever the man was yelling over the howling of the wind through the pipes and wires, but he was pretty sure most of it was variations on “GET DOWN FROM THERE” and swearing.
He managed to perch precariously on the top of the central pillar of the harp, then hand-over-hand up an arm sweeping out to sit on the endcap of the highest point, legs hooked over the pipe he'd climbed for support; he managed to tie the bread into the scarf, and that around the arm of the harp.
A flash of movement out of the corner of his eye on the flat rooftop straight across from his perch caught his attention; he looked up to see Ives, leaning on the ledge, face incredulous. It was impossible to hear anything over the harp and Ives wasn't dumb enough to try, settling for a series of hand gestures – a couple sharp waves at where he was sitting, tapping the side of his head and waving a hand at Thancred, a raised fist and pointing down the direction of the guard, pointing down at the ground, and a wringing motion.
What do you think you're doing, are you touched in the head, there's a guard right there, I'm going to strangle you when you get down from there.
He basically ignored it, sliding back down the arm to the center of the harp; as soon as he'd started tying the bundle onto the arm, the guard had thrown up his hands and stalked off, leaning on the wall at the entrance to the plaza with his arms crossed, shaking his head.
By the time he got back to the ground, his hands and legs were numb from the vibration running through the metal and his ears were ringing; the guard looked like he was muttering something, but wasn't even watching anymore, much less moving to grab him.
He headed out of the plaza, ducking down an alley, up a few ledges and along an eave to the top of a peaked roof nearby.
Ives was already catching up, swinging up easily to sit over the peak. There was a quiet moment with a small angry hand gesture, and then the thief cuffed him on the side of the head, leaving him flailing an arm and catching the moulding to keep his own perch.
“What in the Seven Hells is wrong with you?! We're dodging half the law in the city, we're both wanted for murder, and you're climbing the fecking harp in broad daylight right in front of a guard?!”
“I was fine, and all he saw was some idiot street orphan following custom; he didn't even try for me.”
“He had the idiot street orphan bit down.” Ives crossed his arms, scowling. “Why?”
“Because right now if anybody in this district needs a prayer answered, it's us.”
“Please tell me you don't actually think that stupid legend means anything.”
“It's worth a try, and if any of the Twelve are going to listen, it'd be the Wanderer.”
Ives rolled his eyes with a half-coherent noise. “Do you really think we'd be stuck out here with everyone out to get us if there were gods that would help.”
“I don't think the Twelve are controlling the Inspector, and they certainly aren't responsible for the Voidspawn.”
“No, but it's proof they either don't exist or don't care; if they did, there'd be something here besides the thing you saw.”
“I'd rather pray to them for even a small blessing than sit on my hands and wait for it to kill me.”
“So you're praying to the mountain wind? What do you think was at work when you almost froze to death two years ago? Did it look like the wind cared then? The only way we're getting anything is if we take it ourselves, nobody's going to help you!”
He knew Ives had his moods where things wore on him, but this was a worse one; he edged back, catching a hand shaking on the roof as feeling was coming back into it. “I wouldn't be here if you hadn't pulled me out of that alley and helped me.”
Ives went still, wrinkling his nose and closing his eyes. “You were six and too stupid to knife anyone in the back.”
“And you haven't taken advantage of me yet.”
“What do you think this whole thing is? You mooch off me when you're having a bad week at the square, I mooch off you when things get too hot to work, we're both using each other.”
“...That's not really all you're doing anymore, is it?” It'd been eight years, and he was having a tiny war between knowing that Ives would settle out of it and apologize when some of the worst stress passed and things were less bad, and trying to remember if Ives had ever snapped about using him before instead of a general “most people are assholes” rant.
Ives went more still, taking a few breaths and calming down; a chill was settling over the rooftop, the dim clouded lighting not helping the autumn weather.
“Look, it's been a Hell of a moon, and I've never had the law out for my head like this before; I know you've got my back or they'd have already been scouring the clocktower. Just don't do something stupid like that again, alright? If they catch you it won't be like that last time when you were a kid and weren't fast enough getting your hand out of someone's pocket.” The thief looked down and away, shifting uncomfortably. “ I shouldn't have snapped at you like that.”
Thancred had to blink – by Ives's usual schedule he probably had a week or so after the murder inquisition died down before that would happen, but he wasn't about to argue with Ives growing up a bit. “I'll be more careful.” He drew in a breath. “The Inspector mentioned a name for what it was; I'm going to see if I can't poke around some of the libraries to find out if there's something we can use – they're not going to give up until they have proof you didn't do it.”
“You think you'll find something? That seems like the sort of stuff the scholars would keep a pretty tight lid on.”
He shrugged, leaning back with a hand on the spine of the roof. “I know I've seen a couple bestiaries around that had chapters on Voidspawn; if it's not in one of them, I'll just have to look harder.”
Ives was getting one of those resigned looks. “Do you have any idea how suspicious it'd look if they catch you researching voidspawn when there's rumors there's a cult around?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Ives rolled his eyes with a headshake. “If you don't find anything in the books that're easy to get, let me know; I'll see if I can't get you in touch with some of my contacts, one of them might know something that's not in the books.”
He didn't really trust going to some of the criminal groups, but it was something where they might not have a lot of choice. “I will.”
“Let's get out of this weather; it looks like it might start snowing.”
He made it through a few smaller libraries and bookstores without much luck at all; vague rumors of more powerful beings, but half of it was gibberish that reeked of overblown traveler’s stories, and the other half was a hazy 'they exist and none have lived to tell (that we know of)'. The nagging sense he had a clue that he'd forgotten only got worse, until finally he ended up perching inside the clocktower during the day, curled around the soulstone and focused on it, quietly running through some of the weirder things he'd gotten from it, trying to pay attention to the words he was saying and the meaning it was giving him at the same time.
He caught it in a fragment, something he'd been working on teasing out of it for a while, a meaning flashing through with the snatch of lyric -
'Ware the shadowless, ere your soul will rot.
Ascian.
The only other thing he managed to coax was a few verses of something to do with the collapse of Allag that mostly seemed to be lamenting the arrogance of the late emperor and man's overreached grasp, with one line about “Allagan's Bane” and poisoned gifts, with an entirely different word in Allag that had the same meaning.
Shadowless.
He thunked his head against the wall, exhausted; that was the problem with trying to shake history of a bardic soulstone, ballads and tales didn't necessarily go into a great deal of detail. He knew if he had gotten anything it would've been a gamble if it was even useful and not some embellishment, but that had turned out to be a moot worry, since all he'd really gotten was vague, ominous, and not much.
The largest libraries he dared hadn't been any more help, and the few wider-spread treatises on Allag were mostly focused on piecing things together from bits of archaeological fragments and guesswork about politics and the possible implications of different kinds of potsherds. That managed to get the soulstone reacting, but only resulting in him getting some folk ballad in his head about a fallen hero tortured into a weapon by the Emperor as a punishment for rebellion, calling for divine retribution for the Empire's evils, and fragments of some other counter about the same warrior and his vicious campaign to bring chaos to the benevolent Empire blessed by the gods, mercifully granted a new life.
Fascinating and horrifying, but utterly useless for what he needed.
He was trudging his way back to the clocktower, snow dusting the old cloak, when there was noise and commotion that sounded agitated and alarming, occasional calls of guards trying to break up the crowd around a small church; he hurried towards, curiosity and the sinking feeling it was more relevant than his reading overriding his better sense.
It wasn't a large group of people, and the snatches of conversation he overheard were horrified - “how could anyone”, “the poor thing”, “isn't the priest still in there?” - the inspector was on the steps, having some kind of agitated conversation with a lady roegadyn guard armed with a pistol and gesturing at the door, a few others keeping the passersby back and trying to shoo them away -
And a pikeman trying to take down a gutted child's corpse that'd been nailed over the door.
He found a place further back among the crowd, mouth gone dry and trying not to look; he'd seen dead bodies before, but usually not that mutilated, and aiming for that kind of sacrilege narrowed the list of possible directions it could've come from hard.
The inspector and the marksman came to some kind of agreement, each pushing one of the double doors open; he couldn't make out whatever the inspector shouted over the crowd noise, and it wasn't helped that it was cut off by the simultaneous sound of a gunshot and some kind of unholy screech. The small crowd gathered was very quickly deciding to comply with the directions to get away from the church.
He caught a bare glimpse past them of black wings, a gold and red eye bigger across than his shoulders, and a maw made of teeth; there was a crack of lightning from the inspector's rod followed fast after by a gout of flame over the creature as the thing went down, and the both of them had gone barreling inside.
It was easier to see and he wasn't sure that was a good thing, trying to be as small as he felt in with the newly spaced out and drawn back handful of onlookers. When they came back out, the Inspector still had his rod in hand, a few small arcs of aether running along it, and the marksman was carrying a limp, robed corpse roughly by the back of the neck, the hood hanging half-off around a hole in the head.
What he'd caught of the face was familiar – someone a bit older that was in and out of some of the orphanages, a few dim memories of ducking snowballs in the winter.
He didn't process that the Inspector was addressing the crowd until it was partway through, catching back up with his surroundings in mid-sentence.
“-anyone knows anything about who else is working with this one-” He made a sharp gesture at the corpse the marksman was grimly holding up with his rod - “There will be a reward for coming forward, and we are prepared to negotiate to put an end to this-”
He realized that he was getting more visible as the crowd thinned, people straggling off talking in hushed whispers; he pulled the hood down and hurried off.
With the brazen attack on a church, everything went even worse; Ives was in and out at stranger hours and more harried, and the armed presence on the street had increased.
He heard people talking; that the young man that'd been killed in the church had killed the priest for the summoning, that they thought he was one of the ringleaders, that they were trying to find the cult's hideout and a couple others among the homeless that were leading it.
He waited at the clock tower, resolving to see if Ives could manage anything with his contacts; this ended with him almost treed for a day and a half, the cordons bad enough that he was pretty sure the thief didn't dare come close.
When he got out he went looking; there wasn't much sign of Ives, and if he didn't hear a few of the guards talking about tracking him, he'd have worried he'd gotten caught.
It didn't help the fear that he'd been caught by something else.
There was another quiet disappearance, almost overshadowed by the fallout of the assault on the church, someone a few years younger than him.
He left the district; it wasn't too hard to change costume again and start slipping into libraries, going over shelves; he managed to find a lead, of sorts, but every mention he found was of a different text, and trying to go through library and college records for where it was listed a “special collection” in the main towers.
